Joe Berenbaum wrote in message <34e8c32a.14853148@news.dircon.co.uk>...

>I did a series of portraits of two people, usually mother and
>daughter, where the nearer one was in focus and the other was a couple
>of feet behind and not in focus. This was just somewthing I wanted to
>do, and I really liked the pictures where it worked well, but I found
>that with some lenses, like 50mm Nikkors, both 1.8 mf and 1.4 af, the
>way that the out of focus part of the image was rendered ruined the
>effect of the picture altogether, by bringing a very unattractive
>double image into the out of focus areas. I found that with a Leica
>50mm Summicron I got what I wanted- a soft out of focus effect with no
>other undesirable double images. Thus, when I'm doing that kind of
>photography I take care to use lenses that produce the effect I want.
>A lot of my photography is shot at wide apertures and the appearance
>of the out of focus parts of the image in such pictures is important
>to me.. It doesn't have to be important to everybody. I still like to
>use 50mm 1.8 and 1.4 Nikkors for some things- just not that kind of
>thing. I did read somewhere that one or two of the very early 50mm/f2
>Nikkors were designed differently and I intend to try one some time,
>out of curiosity. I also have some pictures taken years ago with an
>old Minolta MC mount 50/f1.4 PF Rokkor that gives very nice, soft, out
>of focus rendition. I still have the lens somewhere- maybe I could
>find a body to use it on... I wonder what the o.o.f. look is like with
>Minolta af lenses. I think the effect of empty parts of pictures on
>the whole are felt to be important in Japanese art. The out of focus
>areas of photographs may or may not be actually empty, but maybe it is
>no coincidence that the Japanese pay more attention tof the unfocused
>parts of photographs.

I also pay attention to the quality of the out of focus areas
of my photographs (all parts of the photograph are "subject"...),
and for the type of work I do, I prefer a contrasty out of focus
image (some examples of wide-stop images that depend on "snap"
in the out of focus areas can be found on my web page, under
"Aht Fotoz"). "Good bokeh" may be bad bokeh for some of us...;-)

--
David Ruether
http://www.fcinet.com/ruether
ruether@fcinet.com